TCU to stop using ‘freshmen’ for first-year students in nod to gender inclusiveness
There will be no more freshmen on the TCU campus.
The university announced it will no longer use “freshmen” to describe incoming undergraduate students.
Instead, the school will call them “first-year” students. The term will apply to any student with fewer than 24 credit hours, regardless of how long they have been enrolled.
The change takes effect with the start of the fall semester. The move is a nod to gender inclusiveness.
Some TCU students said using “first-year” also helps encompass students who transfer to TCU with more than 24 credit hours.
“First-year students that come to TCU aren’t necessarily all in their first year of college,” said TCU student Cort Ewing. “So for a lot of students, they may be transfer students from other universities coming in as juniors and seniors, some of them are military veterans, so it’s less about the idea of gender and more so about inclusivity of including people’s experiences that they’ve had before college.”
TCU student Matt Gill is a frog camp director who will be one of the people in charge of implementing the change. He said he thinks it is “worth while.”
“We only have stuff to gain by being more inclusive and nobody’s harmed by not calling people freshmen,” Gill said.
TCU Chancellor Victor Boschini said the change is a non-story and the campus won’t be enforcing the terms used by its students.
“It’s called America and people are free to use whatever word — and they undoubtedly will,” Boschini said. “I am trying to think of a bigger non-issue to spend my time on. Oh, I can’t.”
TCU student Julia Lewis agreed with Boschini. She said she doesn’t think the change is going to make that much of a difference.
TCU’s Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Kathryn Cavins-Tull told campusreform.org that the move is “a reflection of our university-wide commitment to inclusive excellence.”
TCU student Luke Homfeldt said that while he thinks the change is “a step in the right direction,” TCU could do more, he said.
“There’s a lot of different things that, especially a school like TCU, in a position like education and furthering young adults, there’s more they can do to advocate for inclusivity than changing ‘freshmen,’” Homfeldt said. “I don’t see the value in that.”
TCU’s Data Governance Executive Board approved the change by vote.
“This move brings TCU in line with current higher education industry standards,” a TCU release said.
Other universities have made the change, including the University of North Carolina in 2009 and Yale University in 2017.
Penn State’s Faculty Senate voted in April to stop using freshmen, sophomore, junior and senior “because they follow a traditional male naming convention.”
Penn State plans to replace all pronouns in course materials and descriptions with they/them/theirs and use non-gendered terms like student or staff instead. move away from a “typically male-centered world” and rid the college of materials with a strong, male-centric, binary character, according to CBS News.
This story was originally published June 9, 2021 at 2:03 PM.
